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What’s with this “Wren” thing?
The oldest extant version of the fable
we
are presenting here appeared in 1913 in the first volume of a two-volume anthology
of Low
Saxon folktales (Plattdeutsche
Volksmärchen “Low German Folktales”)
collected by Wilhelm Wisser (1843–1935). Read
more ...
Danish
Hans
Christian Andersen (1805–
1875) is widely
regarded as being
the pioneer master of the art
of
written Danish storytelling.
Language information: Danish is the official language of Denmark. In the Faeroe Islands it is official
alongside Faeroese and in Kalallit Nunaat (Greenland) alongside Inuktitut (Greenlandic).
It was the official language of Norway until 1830 and of Iceland until 1944.
Danish is also one of the recognized minority languages of Germany. Like all
other Scandinavian languages, Danish underwent massive direct and indirect
influences from medieval Saxon (often erroneously referred to as “German influences”),
the language of the Hanseatic Trading League. There are also a few traces of
Danish influences in certain Low Saxon dialects of Schleswig-Holstein, hailing
from the time of Danish rule.
During much of the 18th and 19th centuries
and until 1948, Danish
was predominantly written with
a
specific
subset
of
the Latin alphabet, called Fraktur, used also for German and some Central European languages. Like German orthography, official Danish orthography
used to require
that
nouns
be
capitalized.
In
other
words,
the
initial
letter
of
a
noun
must
be
a
capital
letter. This rule, too, was abandoned with the end of World War II, as was the
spelling as aa of what is now å, consistent with Norwegian and Swedish conventions.
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